See also: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Like there's a lot i disagree with about the views expressed in his novels, but social conservatism is not something i would accuse him of.

Not reading the next sentence, I thought it was Jubal Hershaw, the author-avatar character but it was Michael Smith and damned if I could remember that. Vonnegut is simply wrong about that. No one remembers Michael Smith by name.

It wasn't a good book at all. If it were a first book by an unknown author, it would never have been published. It was just Heinlein trying to do what he thought was a book for adults rather than his usual young adult sci-fi. Aside from grok, there's nothing memorable. The sex cult stuff is just weird. Indeed if you use grok in a sentence today it marks you as a boomer or maybe a techie. I rarely see this book mentioned at all and never by the kidz.

Speaking of the kidz, Overly Sarcastic Productions does a good piece on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jAkplrZci0

I’m thinking of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It had group marriages, but the marriage practices were ordained by custom and tradition. Not 20th century custom and tradition, but custom and tradition none the less.

I grew up reading Heinlein. I've read it all; the short stories, the juveniles, the late-period novels, the early and late nonfiction essays, the recently published "lost" works. I consider him and Asimov among my formative influences. I disagree with the critics the article cites about the quality of his post-surgery work; Friday is fantastic and Job, the book the profile is putatively about, is also great. They're just different from the Scribner's juveniles. In turn I like the juveniles, but they don't stick with me as much as his short stories, or his late novels like Friday (which did cyberpunk two years earlier and better than Neuromancer did), Job, or (as weird as they are) The Cat Who Walks Through Walls/To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

I very much think, however, that Stranger in a Strange Land can only be read with vicarious embarrassment.

Heinlein has explicitly said that Stranger in a Strange Land was not an effort to convince people to live in any particular way.

>“I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers... It is an invitation to think -- not to believe.”

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/l...

Advocating that people should be willing to reconsider their deeply held cultural beliefs was a major theme in Heinlein's later works.

For what it's worth, Soviet intelligence did infiltrate large parts of American society during the Cold War [1]. This historical fact is often obscured by accounts of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. While McCarthy was a liar and an alcoholic with little to no knowledge of actual Soviet spy networks, the networks did in fact exist.

[0] https://www.azquotes.com/author/6509-Robert_A_Heinlein/tag/r...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United...